


The Death of Air

by Anonymous



Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: M/M, Post Queen of the Damned, just playing with Armand's complicated feelings about the whole thing, not pro Marius/Armand romance, significantly revised from a fic that I originally wrote on LJ in 2006
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 05:36:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20270830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: A series of interconnected ficlets exploring the estrangement between Armand and Marius, the damage their relationship caused, and the feelings that still linger.





	The Death of Air

**Fic 1 - Night Island **  
** Armand POV**

No one spoke the night after Akasha died. There was too much to be said. When I tried to open my mouth, I was overcome by the taste of my own death. I only saw the red haired twins once that night. Mekare watched Maharet as though she would devour her. My Daniel was happy. Now and then he would burst with quickly stifled laughter. I could not tell whether it was the colors on the wall, the chatter of animals outside, or the collective sound of our preternatural heart beats that set him off. I kissed him once, but to look at him was difficult. It had seemed just, that I would let him taste immortality, and then we would die together. It was hideous, really, this collective bruised silence.

I was unable to stay still. I wandered the house, ran my hand over books, the titles of which I couldn’t bear to read. Impossible that all things could have played out as they had, that my past had been neatly collected within the walls of the compound, that it was there for me to question, dismiss, or embrace. Marius, Santino, Lestat, Louis... I wanted to speak them, shake them, ask what dream it was that I’d fallen into. 

Marius.

I found him without looking for him. Or, rather, I hadn’t known that I was looking for him. Perhaps I was. He sat at a desk made of dark rosewood, his back turned to me. How many times had I awoken to see Marius at his desk, scribbling furiously in one of his books? To think they were all gone, burnt, and he was there.

He wasn’t writing though. Marius’s shoulders were slumped, defeated, and his head was in his hands. He wasn’t crying, but he might have been earlier. I had never seen him like this, but then it had been so very long since I had seen him. There was no passion behind his melancholy. It struck me as odd that for once it was he, not I, who was lost. 

Marius knew that I was watching him. He straightened. My skin crawled with an ache to touch him. I did not do it. I ran from the room, and he didn’t follow. It was then that I knew that nothing could come of our reunion

————-  
————-

**Fic 2 **  
**Marius POV**

Santino did not stand until he had bested Armand at chess three consecutive times. He made some excuse about needing to feed, nodded politely, and left. Armand regarded the abandoned pieces, as if studying their formation and deciding what strategy would allow him to win the next game. Oh, and I knew that there would be a next game, and another to follow that. 

Although Armand and Santino had not once spoken, there had been an ease between them which unsettled me. Alone now, in this room with him, the air seemed charged with something dangerous. He would not look at me. 

Earlier, when Louis had left for New Orleans, Armand had raised his hand to keep me from running after him. 

“Lestat can’t be allowed to stay in his room forever,” he had said in a soft, infinitely measured voice that was not the voice that I remembered. His smile, too, had been utterly different from that of the boy I'd known. Still, what did it matter? For a moment we had understood each other. 

A thick fog was settling outside. I could see it through the windows. It turned the moon into a blur of light, a great smudge in the otherwise perfect gray of the sky. I did not understand Armand, did not understand why he had not left the room as he typically did upon finding himself alone with me. I had not understood Amadeo, either. Love is something beyond the understanding of mere immortal minds. It was a thing to be felt, and not analyzed. Perhaps that is where my failures lies. 

“Marius.”

Armand had risen from the chess table, and taken a seat in an armchair across the room from me. 

“Yes?”

“Imagine something. Imagine that our entire kind were on the verge of destruction again. Who would you choose to spend your last hours with, if you were given a choice?”

“You,” I answered, without a moment’s thought.

“Only me?” Armand questioned. “Not everyone here?”

“Everyone, I suppose.”

Armand nodded. “I would choose to spend my last hours with Daniel, or else alone.”

I did not wince at these words, though I wanted to. Of greater importance was hearing him, knowing his mind for the first time in centuries. 

“And why alone, Amadeo?”

A pause. I had said something wrong. It was too late to remind myself that what I had called him was not his name. He shrugged.

I wanted to apologize to him, but somehow the words could not reach my lips. 

Some time passed. Hours perhaps. More than once it seemed as though Armand would rise, but he did not. He had ceased to look at me. I wondered if he played some kind of cruel contest with himself, testing how long he could stand to stay in my company. The thought sickened me. 

—————  
—————

** Fic 3 **

**Marius:**  
  
"Now that she's gone, do you plan to leave as well?"  
  
I looked up, surprised to hear Armand's voice. He hadn't lifted his eyes from the book that he held in his hands, and nothing in his manner suggested that he had spoken at all; it seemed that any answer on my part would be seen as an unwanted interruption.  
  
"I will leave eventually."  
  
Armand nodded.  
  
"But not yet," I finished at length.  
  
It was some time before Armand put down his book and moved in closer to me. I wanted to believe that he had sought my company out of concern, as a few of the others had since Pandora's departure. His eyes, however, were blank, and his face empty. I had seen this expression in him more often than not over the past few weeks, and it worried me. It was as though he showed me this emptiness because it was all that remained of the child I had known, and the rest was merely some twisted construct that had risen in Amadeo's place.  
  
Armand let his hand rest on my shoulder. I knew that he expected some reaction from me, needed it perhaps. I reached up and took his hand in my own, kissed his fingers. To love him was a form of despair. Wasn't it so for his victims?   
  
“I don’t think that you should go looking for Pandora,” Armand said. His voice was even, and he did not retreat from me as he normally did within a few seconds of initiating contact. “It wasn’t good for her here.”   
  
I turned in my chair so that I could look at Armand as he spoke. I let go of his hand. “And from where do you draw this knowledge?” I asked. I sounded wearier than I wanted to. It felt wrong to stay in my chair with Armand standing before me, but I didn’t move.  
  
Armand shrugged. “She did not want your company at this time, and being here she couldn’t escape it.”  
  
It seemed that Armand scrutinized me as one would an opponent in battle.   
  
“I see.”   
  
Armand did not move from where he was standing. After so many months of having him avoid my company, it was unfathomable. I stood, and dragged over the chair on the other side of the room, where he had been sitting earlier in the evening. I turned it so that it faced my own.   
  
“Sit,” I said. “If you want to stay and talk with me, then sit.”  


**Armand:**  
  
I sat across from Marius. The lights in his study were too bright, illuminating us in a garish electric glow that was entirely a product of the 21st century. I was glad of it. The light of candles might have made him seem too much like my old master. I was glad, too, that his smile, certainly meant to be friendly, held a touch of bitterness. It was important to believe that Marius was as changed as I.   
  
“I don’t want to speak with you,” I said. I looked straight at him while I said it, wanting to see his reaction, wanting to see if I unnerved him somewhat. I think it’s safe to say that I did.   
  
“Of course not. Never that.” Marius leaned in closer to me. I found myself thinking of how Lestat had described him, reveling in the humanness of his gestures. As a child, I had not thought so much of how very mortal he seemed; His humanity had been natural to me then, something to be taken for granted beneath his monstrous shell. Now it was the thing that struck me as absolutely uncanny.  
  
“We haven’t spoken yet of all that’s passed between us. We haven’t really spoken at all,” Marius continued. He looked as though I could tell him anything and he would understand, but there was no worth in that.   
  
I had come for a reason, of course. I had woken early in the evening from a dream… a common enough vision, I suppose, of igniting blood, red velvet, charred fingers reaching out of the flames. Such things are too normal to draw much attention from me, and it has been centuries since they disturbed me in any particular manner. On this night, however, I had been struck, upon waking, with the notion that Marius was nearby, and furthermore that I could go see him. And so I had found myself in his study after months of barely interacting with him.  
  
“What do you want?” Marius asked softly.  
  
There was no sense in answering. I suspected that if I remained quiet he would give me what I wanted soon enough. More so, I knew that any request on my part would render it all worthless.   
  
Soon enough, I felt him run his hand through my hair. He looked concerned. I closed my eyes, and let out a slow breath. When he stood, I stood with him. I think I shivered when he ran his hand down my back.   
  
“I love you.” I whispered. It had been so long since I said it, and it had to be said.   
  
I let my head rest against his neck, but only briefly. His hands were up under my shirt now, as if I had willed them there. Moments later, my teeth pierced his skin.

———  
———-

**Fic 4**  
**Armand POV**

Armand did not know why he was burning the roses. To see them shrivel, to see their white petals overcome by orange and black – there was something comforting in that. They had seemed stark and unwelcome sitting on his desk earlier that evening, arranged in a blue vase without so much as a note explaining their origin. It was impossible not to imagine them being held by hands equally white, hands that had survived a fire far grander than that which destroyed the roses.   
  
Armand wished that he could have seen Marius in the days directly following the fire. Perhaps it would have caused him pain, once, to think of his old Master as a charred and loathsome thing. Indeed, he was mildly surprised that it did not. He wanted to know what Marius had looked like then.

"I had thought you might like the gift."  
  
Armand looked up. Marius smiled, but he still carried with him the weariness that Armand had seen since the first evening of their reunion. Armand wanted to tell Marius that the ash collecting at the bottom of the fireplace was a judgment upon him. He wanted to explain the impulse that made him to want see white roses burst into flame. He only shrugged. He wished that Marius would not stand over him."I don’t want to stay here," Armand said. "Pandora has left, Louis and Gabrielle as well.. I never thought that I would be the fourth to leave. I should be the one to remain until the bitter end."

"Where will you go, child?" Armand winced. Marius’s voice was infinitely gentle, like no other voice that he could imagine. It disgusted him, and yet...

He couldn’t be certain that he would ever hear that voice again after they parted, not really. To beg Marius to take him away would be folly, but.. 

"Armand?"

Armand stood, throwing what roses remained into the flames. "Do you need me?" he asked.

”Angel, I want you.”  
  
When Marius reached out to touch him, Armand pulled away.  



End file.
